With President Trump facing a slump in support in the suburbs, his administration on Thursday targeted Obama-era affordable housing regulation, the latest in a series of calls for white voters’ fear of crime and declining value. of the properties.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it would remove a regulation known as Affirmatively to Promote Fair Housing, which was implemented by President Obama in an attempt to promote more integrated communities. Under the rule, cities receiving federal housing aid had to develop plans to address segregation patterns or risk losing money.
The new regulation of the Trump administration would allow local governments much more freedom to decide if their policies were racially discriminatory.
“Washington doesn’t have to dictate what’s best to meet the unique needs of its local community,” Ben Carson, Trump’s housing secretary, said in a statement.
The announcement may have a less practical effect in California than in other parts of the country. In 2018, after Carson first announced plans to remove Obama’s fair housing rule, state lawmakers passed a bill that enshrines a similar effort in state law.
Thursday’s decision follows Trump’s embrace of racist rhetoric to defend Confederate statues, attack Black Lives Matter protesters, and, more recently, criticize Housing policies. He claimed that Democrats want “to abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing Washington’s far-left bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions,” and warned that “they will bring those who know to their suburbs, so their communities will be. insecure. ” and your home values will go down. “
Trump’s rhetoric paints a picture of peaceful suburbs and chaotic cities, one that reflects, in part, his background as a landlord who settled a Justice Department lawsuit that accused his family’s company of discriminating against black tenants, and their formative experiences in New York in the 1970s and 1980s.
Housing experts call the image an outdated cartoon.
“Trump is really in a time jump,” said Richard Florida, an urban planner at the University of Toronto.
As if to prove the point, Trump tweeted a message to “Suburban Housewives of America” after his administration’s announcement Thursday, saying: “Biden will destroy his neighborhood and his American dream.”
But today’s white voters are more likely to see racial bias as an issue, according to polls in the wake of nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, a black man, while in Minneapolis police custody on 25 of May. Additionally, the nation’s crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has declined fairly steadily since then.
And while individual neighborhoods across the country continue to be highly segregated, the suburbs as a whole are no longer as racially uniform as they once were.
Over the past three decades, the proportion that whites make up of residents of long-standing suburban communities, such as those of the Inland Empire, has dropped 20 percentage points, and whites now represent less than 60% of those suburban dwellers, according to the demographer William Frey, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.
“In general, the image that the suburbs are white bastions is one that has not been true for several decades,” he said.
Although Trump has tried to suggest that Obama’s housing rule would lead to more dangerous neighborhoods, academic research has also shown little or no link between affordable housing and higher crime rates.
A recent study by economists at Stanford University found that affordable housing developments led to reduced crime in low-income areas and had no effect on higher-income neighborhoods.
“The infinitesimal risk of an increase in crime as a result of the increase in ‘affordable’ or multi-family housing in the suburbs of the US is greatly outweighed by the benefits for which they are actually housed and other benefits of reducing concentrated poverty, “said Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning. planning and public policy at UCLA who has studied the subject.
Trump divided the suburban vote almost equally with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and won the support of more white voters. Now that he is very wrong in the Joe Biden polls, he has been increasingly shameless in appealing to racism among his supporters.
This week, for example, the White House threatened to veto bipartisan legislation to finance the Pentagon because it included a provision that would rename the military bases that had been named in honor of the Confederate leaders.
Trump also had the support of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white St. Louis couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters from the lawn of his mansion. They made an appearance on a campaign call, and have since been accused by a local prosecutor of illegal use of a weapon.
Corey Lewandowski, senior advisor to the Trump campaign, denied the appeals were racist and called that characterization “completely outrageous.”
“I think blacks also live in the suburbs,” he said. As for Trump spiraling the spectrum of crime, Lewandowski said: “The issue of law and order is the most important thing for many people.”
Trump’s rhetoric and actions, however, continue a century-long history of the federal government working with private real estate interests to develop and maintain segregated communities, especially in the suburbs, said Paige Glotzer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin- Madison and author. from the book “How the suburbs were segregated”.
After the US Supreme Court banned zoning rules that specifically separated whites from blacks in homes in 1917, a series of local and federal practices, including mortgage modification and foreclosure Housing assistance only to white veterans of World War II, effectively blocked black residents from living in newly developed suburban communities.
“What it meant to be successful was living in the suburbs,” said Glotzer. “But the only way to live in the suburbs was to be white. That helped cement the idea that African-Americans weren’t there because of some personal flaws, when in fact it was decades of public and private segregation that were often imposed with violence. “
In 1968, the passage of the Fair Housing Act aimed to ban racially discriminatory housing practices and integrate previously segregated communities. But with federal government approval, many suburban homeowners blocked such efforts by playing on fears about urban disorder, crime, and lower property values.
Similar appeals based on Trump’s fear, Glotzer said, “have been coded to mean race for so long.” Trump knows his audience understands what he is saying and to whom he is referring. “
Although Trump has faced backlash over his racist rhetoric and crackdown on protests, he could still find political success with a more limited focus on housing, said Karyn Lacy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, whose work focuses in the changing nature of America’s suburbs.
“For most Americans, their home is their only asset, and certainly the most valuable one. Embracing debates over alleged increases in crime and declining property values once blacks move in, that is also racist, but white suburban voters can accept it if they believe doing so will protect their assets, ”Lacy said.
Fights to add housing in the suburbs are not always partisan, as recent experience in California demonstrates.
For the past three years, Democratic state lawmakers have tried to push legislation to increase apartment building in neighborhoods now divided almost exclusively into single-family homes, an effort that could have had an especially strong effect on the restructuring of wealthy suburban communities. from the Bay Area and Los Angeles. .
While opposition to the proposal included many activists from low-income tenant organizations concerned with gentrification and displacement, part of the most intense hostility came from suburban homeowners in liberal neighborhoods who complained about the possible loss of local control over the development and character of your community.
State plans failed earlier this year. Lawmakers are now weighing less aggressive proposals to increase home construction in suburban communities.
